“We’re putting a lot of focus on decreasing hallucinations, but it’s a fundamentally hard problem – our models learn from human-written text, and humans sometimes confidently declare things they aren’t sure about.”
Mark Chen continued his answer by saying that they are getting better by the use of “grounding” which is something that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps large language models with. Chen also reveals that they believe that using Reinforcement Learning (RL) may help models stop hallucinating.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a way to teach a machine with experience, rewarding it when it’s correct and withholding the reward when it’s not correct, thus reinforcing good answers. The machine “learns” by making choices that maximizes rewards. In the context of hallucinations, a reward could be a score or signal that indicates that the answer is factual (and it could also be provided by human feedback scores).
Mark Chen continued his response:
“Our models are improving at citing, which grounds their answers in trusted sources, and we also believe that RL will help with hallucinations as well – when we can programmatically check whether models hallucinate, we can reward it for not doing so.”
Does ChatGPT Search Use Bing?
The next question is about what search data does ChatGPT Search use.
The question asked:
“Is ChatGPT Search still using Bing as the search engine behind scenes?”
The answer was provided by Rinivas Narayanan, VP Engineering at OpenAI:
“We use a set of services and Bing is an important one.”
That’s an interesting answer because it’s commonly assumed that Bing is the only search engine. The answer indicated that ChatGPT Search uses multiple “services” and that Bing is the most important. What are the other services that ChatGPT might use? That’s an open question.
What Does OpenAI Say About SEO For ChatGPT Search?
Someone asked the important question about how to optimize content for ChatGPT Search in order to improve rankings. The question was answered by Kevin Weill who said that they were still figuring it out, which could mean that they don’t know or that they’re still figuring out what to say about optimization.
Kevin Weill, Chief Product Officer responded:
“This is a great question—the product just launched today so there’s a lot to figure out still about where search will be similar and where it will be different in an AI world. Would love any feedback you have!”
Takeaways – SEO For ChatGPT Search
Chief Product Officer Kevin Weill is right, these are still the early days of their search and much can still change. The OpenAI Reddit AMA offers first hints at what SEO is growing into.
Other insights:
Bing is the main service ChatGPT Search uses but there are other services it uses as well. That makes Bing an important search engine to rank in.
ChatGPT users are accustomed to natural language interactions and may during the course of their work day use ChatGPT Search.
OpenAI may use Reinforcement Learning at some point to get a better handle on hallucinations.
Personalization may be arriving at some point in the future in the form of a dynamically rendered web page.
Beyond those takeaways is the consideration that OpenAI is not directly competing against Google with a standalone search engine, it has created a completely different experience for searching the web.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Vitor Miranda